Calzaer

You claim he saw it as a positive experience.

The actual text shows no such value judgement.

Ergo, YOU WERE WRONG. You were either honestly mistaken or lying through your teeth. Your anti-apologetics are attempting to change the meaning of the words you yourself uttered in the other thread.

You claimed that Seligman saw his sexual abuse as a positive experience. Seligman says nothing of the sort. In short, you have absolutely no way to know the veracity of your claim, and in making the claim, you were apparently hoping nobody would actually read the book and call you on it.

The book does not say what you claimed it said. Considering your history here as it relates to your disdain for evidence, I'm less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you were simply mistaken rather than wilfully lying.

Fr.Andrew

(Fr Andrew): Any implication of ideological support is in your head...where other evils lurk. Again, the notion that sexual contact between adults and children is always abusive is incorrect, and studies show that a great many adults who have had childhood inter-generational sexual experiences see them in a positive light.

HelenM

Ok, I guess Seligman did write positively about his experience, looking at it again...he writes "he and I had a special relationship" and after the man had gone away, "I was heartbroken. He hadn't even said goodbye."

A little more information: the adult was a man who dressed in rags, who Seligman says would be labeled "a retarded adult with cerebral palsy" today and in those days was considered a "bum" and a "dummy". This person evidently didn't go beyond talking to him and "hugging and kissing" him.

Plus, I see also that Seligman didn't talk to his parents about the experience; he thinks that someone must have seen him with the adult and told his parents who told the police who told the man to stay away from him.

So...yes, it was a positive experience. BUT Seligman isn't citing it to defend adult-child sexual contact. And I think that Rind's paper is disingenuous in using what Seligman said as evidence that sexual abuse is not always horribly traumatic for the child, without pointing out that hugging and kissing (presumably clothed since this was in public, on the street on his way to school), was the extent of the contact between Seligman and the adult. And that the adult according to Seligman was 'retarded'. This is hardly what people generally think of when they think 'child sexual abuse'.

Exactly - for all you know. And basically you know very little.

Unlike you, I'm perfectly satisfied that Seligman is not trying to promote or defend adults having sexual activity with children. The book this is in is about the extent to which adults need not be controlled by their childhood experiences. It's not a book about children and it's not a book about adults having sex with children.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by yguy
[B]"So this preface: I believe sexual abuse is evil. It should be condemned and punished."

Why? Seligman clearly says that what happened to him would be called sexual abuse today. By implication, we also see that at the time he didn't feel abused. So what? Are you saying he has no credibility in which he says as an adult simply because as a nine year old he didn't feel abused? That makes no sense to me.

You seem to be missing that there is a huge difference between "my experience didn't seem like abuse to me" and "based on my experience I've concluded that nine year old boys would benefit from being molested by newspaper sellers".

Helen

Fr.Andrew

Hello Brighid--I'm sorry I didn't see this before.
I think we agree, pretty much.
I believe that the stigma attached to intergenerational sex can be as harmful to a child as the sex itself...and I think we could do a lot to reduce that harm by getting beyond the hysteria and taking a realistic look at the subject.
I think that's true of all the sexual baggage that we've inherited from our religious culture...from masturbation to monogamy.

I have no interest in a discussion of pedophilia, either. It's a dead-end street. Emotions run too high and nothing's ever settled.

I would like to generate some discussion on the harm we do our children by forcing on them an unhealthy and unrealistic view of sex, courtesy our religious culture.

HelenM

That's fine, but it should be its own thread since that's not what Seligman is saying. His complaint is not with the way we view sex but with the way some therapists try to help people, including people who've been sexually abused in some way in their childhood.

Please start your own thread for your discussion.

Helen

yguy

That may not be his intent, but one can hardly be surprised that certain people have found his idiocy in this matter useful.

But we still don't know if there were sexual undertones.

How many times am I gonna have to remind you people that I never said he was trying to promote it?

An adult knowingly eliciting sexual feelings in a child of 9 is abuse. Some children know that, though they can understandably be misled if the perp is a trusted authority such as a parent/step-parent. And if this guy didn't do it knowingly, something was seriously wrong with Seligman. He apparently had an illegitimate need for acceptance which he has, presumably, failed to understand to this day.

You have an odd penchant for putting words in my mouth.

yguy

Here ya go, Andrew.

Fr.Andrew

(Fr Andrew): Quite right, Helen. I didn't mean to hijack your thread...just thinking out loud.

HelenM

Can you clarify what you mean by his 'idiocy'?

Are you saying he's idiotic not to have objected publically to that CSA paper?

Or to have admitted that his own personal childhood experience didn't traumatize him?

Or for some other reason?


It seems like there must have been for him to say it would be called child sexual abuse. However, I wouldn't necessarily expect being hugged and kissed, clothed, in public, to have as extreme an effect on a child, even with sexual undertones, as sexual activity done unclothed in private, which I would describe as more 'violating' of boundaries.

Anyway, he's "it didn't traumatize me" rather than "I don't see what's wrong with adults doing that to children". Again, there's a big difference.

Maybe several, because it's hard to believe you're so convinced of his 'idiocy' if you don't even think he's trying to promote it.

Anyway I apologize if I went beyond what you actually wrote.

Then you and Seligman agree on that.

I think what 9 year olds know varies a lot, depending on their experiences and what they've been taught so far.

I think it's natural for a 9 year old to be appreciative of an adult who takes an interest in them. I remember that as an age where one feels quite grown up already, but also one where adult attention meant a lot to me.

Again, I apologize if I did that.

But since you don't think Seligman is promoting adults having sexual contact with children, I don't understand what it is that you find so objectionable about what he's written.

Again, is it -

1) That he wasn't traumatized by what happened to him when he was 9 but rather writes "we had a special friendship"?

2) That he continues to admit this as an adult?

3) That he hasn't publically objected to what Rind et al wrote?

What is your problem with Seligman? Maybe as far as you're concerned you've written it out already a number of times but would you be so kind as to restate it as concisely and clearly as possible, one more time?

Helen

HelenM

yguy, have you read this?

Weathering a Political Storm
A Contextual Perspective on a Psychological Research Controversy
Ellen Greenberg Garrison and Patricia Clem Kobor, American Psychological Association

American Psychologist, 2002, Vol. 57, No. 3, 165-175, 2002

In the spring of 1999, a storm of controversy arose at the local, state, and national levels surrounding an article on the effects of child sexual abuse published in 1998 in Psychological Bulletin. The article was vehemently denounced by various media outlets, conservative grassroots organizations, members of the general public, state legislatures, and ultimately by the United States Congress. The authors chronicle these unprecedented events and related challenges faced by the American Psychological Association. The authors also describe the Association's efforts to resolve the crisis, while staunchly upholding academic freedom and scientific integrity, and review the lessons learned for the field of psychology.

quoted from this page


I can only find the abstract online.

About Rind et al itself: they say things that are most definitely not in the book. The paper says: "This was the first adult who took him seriously, who was willing to discuss the issues of the world with him (gotten from the newspapers he was selling). " Whereas Seligman says "He told me his troubles and he told me mine". As best I can tell, Rind's statement is speculative, unless he talked to Seligman and got more information than is in the book, which I doubt since there is no mention of that in the paper.

Rind's paper then says: "In one of his recent books"

(which is odd because it seems that the previous paragraph came from the same book - so why mention the book now instead of at the beginning, implying more than one source for the Seligman information? I can't find a bibliography for the paper so I don't know for sure whether they claim more than one source for Seligman's comments)

, Seligman reviewed some of the research on the correlates of CSA and concluded, as we have, that mental health researchers have vastly overstated the harmful potential of CSA. He commented that "it is time to turn down the volume" on this issue that has risen to histrionic proportions"

Based on what I can find, the book actually says: "If your child is abused or if you were abused, my best advice is to turn down the volume as soon as possible. Reliving the experience repeatedly may retard the natural healing".

Who would argue with that - that causing a child to repeatedly relive a difficult experience is to be avoided?

Anyway, I can't find anything closer to Rind's quote about turning down the volume than that in Seligman's book. And according to these notes, the book Rind used as source material is indeed the one I have out of the library.

Helen

p.s. Here's an APA statement which was presumably made because of the Rind paper